Got a big country house? Now all you need is a poet to immortalise it
400pp, Liverpool, £19.99
★★★★ ★
HCountry house poetry was supposed to have died in 1660 – but the genre endures today
ave you got a big house, ideally somewhere in the Cotswolds? Then here’s a proposition for you: become my patron. Invite me to stay, set me up with a sinecure (or a sack of cash) and I’ll write a verse epic praising the beauty of the wellgroomed lawns and equally wellgroomed owner, flattering your friends and insulting your rivals, with a few nymphs and fawns thrown in gratis.
If anything about that sounds inappropriate, well, it just goes to show how much has changed since the days of Andrew Marvell, born 400 years ago this March. His “Upon Appleton House” (1651) is often said to have closed the book on country house poetry. According to the critic GR Hibbard, “After 1660, this kind of poem was no longer written, because the way of life that it reflects, and out of which it grows, was on the decline.”
If that’s so, how do we explain Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems? This Marvell-less but marvellous new anthology of 20th- and 21st-century poems comes with an introduction by Kevin Gardner (its co-editor, with the poet John Greening) tracing the enduring life of this supposedly short-lived genre from 1611 to today.
Gardner’s thesis is fascinating, even when he contradicts himself. “It may have been Byron who introduced the elegiac note,” he writes, forgetting that just a few pages earlier he’d credited that same innovation to Shakespeare’s contemporary Emilia Lanyer (she “established one of the basic tropes of the country house poem, the elegiac sense of something vital now lost”).
The book’s architecture is solid: there are charmingly opinionated, gossipy biographies, not only for each poet (George Barker’s “output was impressive, as was his love-life”) but also for each house. You may have read TS Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”, but do you know how Norton got burnt? I didn’t.
It’s a tale with the Gothic melodrama of Wuthering Heights; lack of space prevents me from telling it here.
And what of the poems themselves? Like any big-themed anthology, Hollow Palaces is necessarily a mixed bag of brilliance and dross. Geoffrey Hill’s spirit-of-England sonnet “The Laurel Axe” and Patience Agbabi’s Browning-esque monologue “The Doll’s House” are poems everyone should read; that this book includes both is a testament to its eclectic spirit.
In sections loosely organised by theme – “Dreams & Secrets”, “Ghosts & Echoes” – we encounter many of the obvious names (Heaney, Yeats, Plath, Betjeman), but Hollow Palaces is also peopled by the shades of unread writers: does anyone still enjoy Sacheverell Sitwell? Did anyone ever? Of the now unfashionable cohort, Vita Sackville-West’s hypnotically musical “Sissinghurst” was a pleasant discovery: the house becomes an underwater landscape of “wandering fronds”, where “The night-time and the night of time have blent/ Their darkness, and the waters doubly sleep.”
There are a number of poems by writers not primarily known for their poetry: Bernardine Evaristo, Robert Conquest, Open All Hours star Juliet Aykroyd, Agatha Christie. I couldn’t help imagining them all as suspects at one of Christie’s overcrowded country house crime-scenes: just imagine the murderous looks over the breakfast table between, say, working-class warrior Tony Harrison and the late Tory peer Lord Gowrie.
But these motley houseguests have much in common. Looking around, they see the same “air of dignified decay” (Wendy Cope), a sense of “what is left when mythologies disappear” (George Szirtes), a feeling that “the living always come too late” (JC Hall). The attitude toward these fading piles’ owners (if still in residence) is never envy, occasionally anger, often pity. When the National Trust has become a culture wars battleground, these poems’ insistence on ambiguity, empathy and nuance feels essential.
Why do we keep visiting such places, with their often tenuous claims for historic importance? They matter because we imagine that they matter. Penny Boxall’s witty “The King’s Bed”, written in the voice of a tour-guide or placard, captures this to a tee. “In 1665 the King slept in this bed, or one quite like it,” we are told, a boast that’s instantly watered down (“1665 or thereabouts”) until the final concession: “What is known is that he was the monarch/ living in those times, and so slept somewhere.// Nearby houses will make their own claims./ By reading this you have brought him to this bed.”